RE: [Xen-ia64-devel][PATCH] optimization for windows

[Alex Williamson <alex.williamson@xxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2007-04-28 at 10:10 +0800, Xu, Anthony wrote:
> 
> I had been thinking of this issue.
> What I concern is, this optimization is specific to windows.
> So if user sets "guest = windows", and runs linux as guest, 
> This may make guest linux behave strangely, or crash.
> Yes, you can say this is user's fault, but user may complain.
> 
> 
> What's your position?

Hi Anthony,

   I've been thinking about ways to detect which OS is running.  Having
Xen guess based on page sizes of regions seems fairly error prone and
hard to debug if it goes wrong.  A configuration option in the domain
config file is a more manual processes, but should provide a cleaner
interface into Xen to set guest specific optimizations.  At some point
we might be able to make this automatic if we can hook into the ACPI
_OSI method in the GFW.  I don't know if that would be possible.
There's also the _OS method, but nearly every OS reports some flavor of
Windows for that method because it's often the only path through ACPI
that gets tested.  Hopefully the same won't happen to the _OSI
interface.  We'll need to see if upstream is in favor of a guest
specific optimization flag in the config file or has other suggestions
about how to accomplish this.  Thanks,

        Alex

-- 
Alex Williamson                             HP Open Source & Linux Org.


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